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“Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.”

— Warren Buffett

The Warren Buffett investment philosophy calls for a long-term investment horizon, where a twenty year holding period, or even longer, would fit right into the strategy. How would such a strategy have worked out for an investment into Bank of New York Mellon Corp (NYSE: BK)? Today, we examine the outcome of a twenty year investment into the stock back in 1999.

Start date: 04/19/1999
$10,000

04/19/1999
$18,065

04/17/2019
End date: 04/17/2019
Start price/share: $39.95
End price/share: $48.35
Starting shares: 250.31
Ending shares: 373.78
Dividends reinvested/share: $14.44
Total return: 80.72%
Average annual return: 3.00%
Starting investment: $10,000.00
Ending investment: $18,065.50

As shown above, the twenty year investment result worked out as follows, with an annualized rate of return of 3.00%. This would have turned a $10K investment made 20 years ago into $18,065.50 today (as of 04/17/2019). On a total return basis, that’s a result of 80.72% (something to think about: how might BK shares perform over the next 20 years?). [These numbers were computed with the Dividend Channel DRIP Returns Calculator.]

Notice that Bank of New York Mellon Corp paid investors a total of $14.44/share in dividends over the 20 holding period, marking a second component of the total return beyond share price change alone. Much like watering a tree, reinvesting dividends can help an investment to grow over time — for the above calculations we assume dividend reinvestment (and for this exercise the closing price on ex-date is used for the reinvestment of a given dividend).

Based upon the most recent annualized dividend rate of 1.12/share, we calculate that BK has a current yield of approximately 2.32%. Another interesting datapoint we can examine is ‘yield on cost’ — in other words, we can express the current annualized dividend of 1.12 against the original $39.95/share purchase price. This works out to a yield on cost of 5.81%.

Another great investment quote to think about:
“Everyone has the brainpower to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach. If you are susceptible to selling everything in a panic, you ought to avoid stocks and mutual funds altogether.” — Peter Lynch